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This article provides a close reading of the Swedish prime minister's speech to the nation in September 2023 during a spiral of deadly shootings. From a criminological perspective it engages with the relation between policing a crisis and the crafting of a state project. Sweden's punitive turn stands in sharp contrast to the previous 'Nordic model' which was regarded as exceptionally humane. What, asks the author, are the main ideological features of the current Swedish government's security state project? Theoretically, the article draws from critical contributions on racism and security. The analysis shows that the discourse of the Swedish head of government targets racialised populations, within and without the borders of the nation. The policing of the current crisis should be conceptualised as a race to the bottom − in a dual sense. Firstly, it is a reconfiguration of Sweden's race relations. Second, it is a drift along a militarisation continuum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do protracted crises shape indigenous food systems, and what are their ramifications for food and nutritional security? Building on decolonial and interdisciplinary research approaches, this paper assesses the consequences of militarised violence for Kashmir's food system. We document the impact of settler‐colonialism and conflict‐induced agrarian changes on delocalisation of diets. The protracted nature of the crises has two key implications for changes in dietary patterns. First, land control over common land dispossesses the local population and hinders food production. Second, disenfranchisement from (agricultural) land has led to increased reliance on markets that are flooded by imported foods as local production declines. The paper argues that the state plays an important role in food system changes by destroying local patterns of food production and consumption. Slow violence and agrarian de‐development serve as tools to de‐develop the local food system. Indigenous food cultures form part of everyday resistance and resilience that are operationalised as mitigation and adaptation strategies to address food insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integration between the American state and technology capital has deep roots in the military‐industrial complex that has structured the US geopolitical economy since World War II. This article makes the case for understanding the urban‐regional dimensions of technology capital in terms of a transformation of, rather than as a departure from, Cold War geopolitics. It introduces the concept of a social structure of militarisation to analyse the transition from military‐Keynesianism to tech‐oriented militarism, developing this concept through a case study of high‐tech firms in the Seattle region. Our analysis shows how the class dynamics that underpinned the growth of Seattle's “high‐tech” aerospace sector in the postwar period conditioned the subsequent growth of the information and biotechnology sectors. Like other tech cities, Seattle's economy remains a privileged site of technical and managerial labour within the extended US national security state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the significance of imperial relations in shaping competing transnational interests in Africa as a site for land and natural resource extraction. Accounts of China leading the scramble for land and other natural resources in African countries obscure the dominance of the US and European countries in such extraction. Extractivist engagements by three of the principal countries in the original BRICS grouping - China, India, and Russia - should be viewed against this backdrop. The analysis points to varying manifestations of violence, often sexualised, that women experience amid the immiseration and displacement that all community members face as a result of extractivist activities. Feminist initiatives against such relations strive to expose and undo the confluence of extractivism and militarisation in the structuring of such violence. The revisioning of the role of the state that such a shift requires is integral to transnational and regional feminist struggles for gender justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Unification of Italy, the city of Naples did not suffer any particular militarisation. In addition to the reinforcement of castle defences, the monasteries suppressed during the French Decade and the subsequent Bourbon era underwent a change of use into care centres as a result of the damage caused by the war. The few new projects for city defence structures arose in strategic positions, allowing control of the territory in all directions. The Istituto Storico e di Cultura dell’Arma del Genio (ISCAG) preserves around four hundred cartographies of the Neapolitan territory, which depict the military presence in the city since the early 19th century. Among the reproductions, a project from the 1880s concerning a territorial area that was profoundly modified in the following centuries is of particular interest. The project relates to a closed construction to be built on the Camaldoli hill, containing plans and sections of the new fortification to be erected, and complete with a conservative variant concerning the preservation of the 16th-century church. The contribution intends to analyse the militarisation projects that were to be established in pleasant, panoramic and uncontaminated places in the Neapolitan landscape, which within a few decades would no longer be recognisable due to the damage caused above all by post-war speculation. Through the critical investigation of graphic and iconographic sources, the final objective of this work is the construction of a digital model of the projects that, appropriately inserted into a digital territorial context, will make it possible to visualise the Neapolitan hills in the particular connotation that the new interventions would have given them.

A decade after the start of the peace talks between the Colombian state and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP) insurgency, the country's military has not been immune to the polarised debates surrounding the final 2016 peace agreement, particularly as today the country experiences a significant rise in polarisation, social discontent and organised armed violence that is blamed by multiple sectors of Colombian society on the peace agreement itself. This commentary traces the origins and development of recent pro-military narratives in Colombia, explaining how apprehensions by the military to the 2016 peace agreement translated into a 'stab-in-the-back' notion, portraying the military as victims of a betrayal by the civilian leadership. The consequence of this narrative has been a galvanisation of the support of various societal actors of the military, including by politicising the military institution, to defend Colombia's decades-old militarised national security approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the autumn of 2014, with the 2013–16 West Africa Ebola epidemic spiralling out of control, the United Kingdom announced a bespoke military mission to support—and in some ways lead—numerous Ebola response functions in Sierra Leone. This study examines the nature and effect of the civil‐military relationships that subsequently developed between civilian and military Ebola response workers (ERWs). In total, 110 interviews were conducted with key involved actors, and the findings were analysed by drawing on the neo‐Durkheimian theory of organisations. This paper finds that stereotypical opposition between humanitarian and military actors helps to explain how and why there was initial cooperative and collaborative challenges. However, all actors were found to have similar hierarchical structures and operations, which explains how and why they were later able to cooperate and collaborate effectively. It also explains how and why civilian ERWs might have served to exclude and further marginalise some local actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to wrest away the notion of popular political resistance and performativity from the realm of visibility in the 'public' sphere/space and place them within the unperformed acts that remain optically invisible. Taking the example of India-controlled Kashmir, where public spaces remain militarized and performative assemblies criminalized, the article focuses on how popular resistance to Indian rule is regularly embodied within what we call subaltern performativity. Furthermore, the gendered nature of this subaltern performativity is also underlined through ethnographic fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political conflict has plagued Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region of Hindu-majority India, ever since the partition. The crisis worsened by the end of the 1980s and has continued to disrupt peace in the valley to date. The conflict arguably entered a new phase as the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was elected to power in 2014, which also joined the ruling coalition of the Jammu and Kashmir state in 2015 for the first time. Over this period, Kashmir's resistance evolved into subtler forms, including cultural expressions like memoirs. Published in 2021, Farah Bashir's debut work, Rumours of Spring, is a deeply personal yet undeniably political exploration of the crisis in Kashmir from its aggravated phase in the beginning of the 1990s. This paper argues that the nuanced depiction of the crisis in the memoir demands an intersectional reading of the traumatising impact of militarisation and militarism on Kashmir's everyday life, especially given the subject position of the narrator as a Muslim woman. The works on militarisation by Jacklyn Cock, as employed by Samreen Mushtaq to analyse the situation in Kashmir, provide theoretical insights for this reading. Set in Kashmir's identitarian conflict, the Muslim identity is central to the narrative. We argue that in Bashir's memoir, religion finds a complex representation, with the Qur'an and Kashmiri folklore serving as respites in times of crisis, even as the fundamentalist factions contribute to their oppressive reality. Bashir's work openly engages with the experience of being a Muslim in Hindu India. The paper also attempts to place the work in a larger corpus of life-writing by women in conflict zones, comparing the work with Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries (2003), a Palestinian memoir by Suad Amiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International actors routinely demonstrate their military-technological capabilities through spectacular visual performances such as weapons tests, exercises and exhibitions. These public spectacles are internationally observed through the widespread circulation of images that visually represent the practice of demonstration in myriad ways. In this article, I conduct a case study of Russian demonstrations of uncrewed military vehicles during the Zapad 2021 military exercise, to illustrate that capability demonstrations do not merely have rational and linear effects on the strategic calculus of actors, but rather that they are a coherent set of international visual practices shaping how onlookers perceive war, violence and the tools of military force. I argue that the visual patterns and themes observable in the images of military demonstrations establish commonsensical perceptions of the necessity of using (algorithmically mediated) military force in the conduct of international politics, and the normality of employing ever-evolving, technologically advanced instruments of violence. Moreover, I contend that these perceptions are reinforced by the contexts in which the practices of production, circulation and consumption of the images take place. As such, this article develops a theoretical framework that allows for the systematic study of military capability demonstrations as an important visual site of international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the development of militarisation in the liberation movements from the 1960s to 1979. It argues that the militarisation of politics and the state that would dominate Zimbabwe in the post-colonial period has its roots in both the Rhodesian state and the liberation movements. It asserts that the Zimbabwean state was militarised at birth primarily because the liberation movements had the military dominating politics, a process that was also, though variably, happening in the Rhodesian state. The article concludes that the militarisation phenomenon that dominates Zimbabwean politics and state today can only be disentangled when the forces that generated it are properly understood and situated in their context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects historically and contemporaneously on the relationship between 'International Education and Development' actors and foreign intervention in our colonial past and present, with a particular focus on Education in Emergencies (EiE), a sub-field of research and practice within 'International Education and Development'. Theoretically, this work is underpinned by a critical application of the 'implicated subject', Rothberg's (2019) conceptual addition to the study of violence and injustice which seeks to go beyond binaries of 'victim and perpetrator' and recognise the way many others are 'implicated' in systems of violence and injustice. In the first section we explore this framing for researchers and practitioners in the field of EiE and the complex ways that researchers and practitioners might be understood as 'implicated subjects'. In the second part we explore two dimensions of EiE actors as 'implicated subjects': Diachronic and Synchronic. In the diachronic dimension we highlight the way the colonial past hangs heavy in the present and in the synchronic dimension we explore the case of Afghanistan, and the links between military, development and education strategy. In the conclusion we reflect on their implication for improved ethical practices in EiE and in the broader field of International Education and Development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Jacobite rising of 1745–1746 saw several thousand Scots rebel against the British crown. Yet it also provided opportunities for Scots to demonstrate their loyalty to the crown. After the rising was over, a brutal pacification was accompanied by significant legislative and institutional changes which sought to inculcate long-term loyalty in the Highlands. Once again, numerous Scots participated in the framing and implementation of these changes, which eventually also provided an opportunity for the disloyal to enter the imperial fold. This article examines the roles of loyalist Scots during and after the rising. In doing so it demonstrates understandings of loyalty, neutrality, and disloyalty during this transformative period and illustrates the important role of Scots in inculcating loyalty in the Highlands. It argues that the experiences of Scots, and the British more generally, in this domestic setting influenced the British imperial state's attempts to actively craft loyalty elsewhere in the British Atlantic World, particularly in North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research analyses the construction of childhood in three children's books related to the Cyprus Problem through the lens of Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory. The discourse on childhood, deployed in books whose narratives are related to an armed conflict, is seen to have four nodal points: innocence, citizenship, savagery, and otherness. Our discourse-theoretical analysis, which uses a retroductive approach (Glynos and Howarth), demonstrates that in these three children's books, the nodal points of innocence and citizenship are particularly strong, but all four nodal points are present. The analysis also shows how these nodal points intersect with the discourses of victimhood and militarism, which alter the articulation of the childhood discourse itself and produce significant internal tensions. These alterations and tensions demonstrate the deeply political nature of the childhood discourse at times of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently there has been media speculation about Japan's move away from pacifism towards a more active role in global conflict, focusing on the war in Ukraine. The lack of military infrastructure and research and development in Japan since World War II have also had a profound impact on a lack of preparedness for COVID 19 vaccines, as the infrastructure needed was often linked to military development. We discuss how such changes have resulted in a desire for a buildup of military development including vaccine development in Japan. These changes, should they take place, will signify a shift away from the post-war period as Japan develops a new global role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 29th May 2019, Nigeria celebrated the twentieth anniversary of her latest democratisation process. Within this period, Nigeria has successfully organised six (6) elections with three changes of government. This is quite remarkable for democracy in Nigeria. However, because of the long years of military rule (31 years), it has been difficult to obliterate the hangover of the militarised psyche of Nigerian political actors. Despite the fact that we have civil rule, Nigeria still experiences abuse of the constitution, brutalisation of the citizenry, crackdown on the press, violent electioneering, significant influence of the military on political and social issues, which are identified with military rule. This study examined how democratic Nigerian democracy is since the last twenty years. It highlighted the features of military rule in our democracy. Workable recommendations such as ensuring proper devolution of powers, implementation of fiscal federalism, elimination of executive immunity etc are suggested for Nigeria to move from a militarised democracy to the ideal democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the case of Zimbabwe to explore the interface between militarisation and state capacity, and through that critique the emancipatory potential of the human security concept. It argues that militarisation undermines state capacity to provide emancipatory security as envisioned in the human security concept. A militarised state is severely incapacitated and challenged to deliver emancipatory security because it lacks the functional capacity and legitimacy of a state that is capable of safeguarding the security of the individual. The Zimbabwean case shows how the nature of the struggle for the country's independence conditioned the political elite's siege mentality and concomitant predisposition to use militarisation to safeguard their interests while ignoring those of the broader citizenry. By underscoring the adverse effects of militarisation on state capacity and legitimacy, the Zimbabwean case reinforces critiques of the state-centric approach of the human security concept, which severely constraints the latter's emancipatory potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Jurídica (0103-3506) is the property of Revista Juridica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This document is an afterword written by Cynthia Enloe for the special issue on militarization in Critical Military Studies. Enloe emphasizes the importance of grounding feminist scholarship in the messy realities of daily life, highlighting the interconnectedness of concepts such as militarization, misogyny, racism, and heteronormativity. The special issue was developed by Manuela Trindade, Jana Tabak, and Monica Herz during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, where militarized police and military barracks were prominent. Enloe argues that investigating militarization requires looking beyond the military itself and examining its presence in various aspects of society. She also emphasizes the need for collective effort and feminist curiosity in the process of demilitarization. [Extracted from the article]

Abstract The 2013–2016 West Africa Ebola Epidemic is the largest outbreak of Ebola in history. By September, 2014 the outbreak was worsening significantly, and the international president of Médecins Sans Frontières called for military assistance. In Sierra Leone, the British and Sierra Leonean militaries intervened. They quickly established a National Ebola Response Centre and a constituent network of District Ebola Response Centres. Thereafter, these inherently militarised centres are where almost all Ebola response activities were coordinated. In order to examine perspectives on the nature of the militaries’ intervention, 110 semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted and analysed. Military support to Sierra Leone’s Ebola response was felt by most respondents to be a valuable contribution to the overall effort to contain the outbreak, especially in light of the perceived weakness of the Ministry of Health and Sanitation to effectively do so. However, a smaller number of respondents emphasised that the military deployments facilitated various structural harms, including for how the perceived exclusion of public institutions (as above) and other local actors from Ebola response decision making was felt to prevent capacity building, and in turn, to limit resilience to future crises. The concurrent provision of life-saving assistance and rendering of structural harm resulting from the militaries’ intervention is ultimately found to be part of a vicious cycle, which this article conceptualises as the ‘political economy of expedience’, a paradox that should be considered inherent in any militarised intervention during humanitarian and public health crises.

Abstract Background In September, 2014, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) called for militarised assistance in response to the rapidly escalating West Africa Ebola Epidemic. Soon after, the United Kingdom deployed its military to Sierra Leone, which (among other contributions) helped to support the establishment of novel and military-led Ebola Virus Disease (Ebola) response centres throughout the country. To examine these civil-military structures and their effects, 110 semi-structured interviews with civilian and military Ebola Response Workers (ERWs) were conducted and analysed using neo-Durkheimian theory. Results The hierarchical Ebola response centres were found to be spaces of ‘conflict attenuation’ for their use of ‘rule-bound niches’, ‘neutral zones’, ‘co-dependence’, and ‘hybridity’, thereby not only easing civil-military relationships (CMRel), but also increasing the efficiency of their application to Ebola response interventions. Furthermore, the hierarchical response centres were also found to be inclusive spaces that further increased efficiency through the decentralisation and localisation of these interventions and daily decision making, albeit for mostly privileged groups and in limited ways. Conclusions This demonstrates how hierarchy and localisation can (and perhaps should) go hand-in-hand during future public health emergency responses as a strategy for more robustly including typically marginalised local actors, while also improving necessary efficiency—in other words, an ‘inclusive hierarchical coordination’ that is both operationally viable and an ethical imperative.

The subject of the study is the relationship between Ukrainian local government structures, municipal standards set by the Council of Europe, and their intersection with human rights and decentralisation policies, especially in the context of ongoing militarisation in certain regions of Ukraine. The study aims to analyse how these elements interact and influence each other in the Ukrainian governance system, exploring the legal, policy and practical aspects of this complex interaction. Methodology. The methodology of a study involves a combination of research methods and approaches in order to comprehensively investigate the subject matter. In addition to the legal analysis, the authors presented the results of the document analysis. Also, because the Ukrainian decentralisation reform has had a major impact on most spheres of local life, the authors have chosen an interdisciplinary approach: given the complexity of the issue, this approach helps to incorporate elements of law, economics and international relations to provide a holistic understanding of the issues at hand. The results of the study showed that: a) the Council of Europe currently lacks human rights standards that are integrated with its municipal standards. This is a significant gap that could be strategically addressed, given the potential of local government bodies in the field of human rights protection; b) Ukraine would benefit from the development of a comprehensive framework outlining actions to be taken by local government bodies to protect human rights and facilitate the implementation of European Court of Human Rights judgments. Despite the pervasive effects of militarisation throughout the country, post-conflict reconstruction will require the continuation of these policies. This is particularly important as Ukraine seeks to rebuild the nation and resume the reforms that were underway before the outbreak of conflict, including municipal reform with a focus on financial decentralisation and reform of the implementation of ECHR judgments. Conclusion. In summary, militarisation in certain regions of Ukraine has created a number of complex challenges for local governments, affecting security, governance, human rights and social services. The protracted nature of the conflict has made it even more difficult to address these issues. Finding sustainable solutions to these challenges requires a coordinated effort involving local authorities, the national government, international organisations and civil society to promote stability, protect human rights and rebuild affected communities.

Copyright of Contributions to Contemporary History / Prispevki za Novejšo Zgodovino is the property of Prispevki za Novejso Zgodovino and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Armed forces in urban areas are a very visible source of socio‐spatial and urban change. Even in contemporary cities 'at peace', this presence and ensuing changes can be wide‐ranging, evident across infrastructure, organisations, narratives of place, events, and everyday activities. Although over the past 2 decades critical military studies and urban geopolitics have explored some of these themes, an urban studies perspective on such military geographies in peacetime has elicited far less attention. The aim of this article is to open up opportunities for deeper conceptualisation and research on urban military geographies. This article establishes a dialogue between critical military studies and urban geopolitics, to review the different dimensions of the influence of a military presence in urban space, and to provide a synthesis of these two bodies of literature. Using Lefebvre's dialectical theory of spatial production, this review shows how cities can be privileged spaces for the reproduction of militarism and preparation for war. Moreover, it examines how the presence of military forces in peacetime can influence the material and immaterial production of urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anarchist participation in the Popular Army during the Spanish Civil War has largely been subsumed into wider narratives regarding the modernising impulses of the Republican state on the one hand, and the resistance to statist collaboration mounted within the libertarian movement on the other. In this dichotomy, the anarchists who participated in militarisation are either seen as latecomers to the far-sighted, pan-antifascist project spearheaded by the Republican leadership, or else as passive spectators to the brutal dismantling of the revolutionary project. The weakness of this narrative is that it largely neglects not only the varied motives for accepting militarisation, but also the considerable agency exerted by anarchists at the front in resisting anti-libertarian persecution, while constructing a new identity as the vanguard of antifascism. Drawing on a combination of syndicalist reports, oral testimonies and anarchist press materials, this paper rejects the accepted vision of the front as a space of lethargic defeat. Rather, it reinterprets it as a space in which the anarchists instrumentalised their traditions and practices, alongside their inviolable moral authority achieved through their antifascist war experience, to establish a libertarian subculture within the Popular Army. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In September, 2014, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) called for militarised assistance in response to the rapidly escalating West Africa Ebola Epidemic. Soon after, the United Kingdom deployed its military to Sierra Leone, which (among other contributions) helped to support the establishment of novel and military-led Ebola Virus Disease (Ebola) response centres throughout the country. To examine these civil-military structures and their effects, 110 semi-structured interviews with civilian and military Ebola Response Workers (ERWs) were conducted and analysed using neo-Durkheimian theory. Results: The hierarchical Ebola response centres were found to be spaces of 'conflict attenuation' for their use of 'rule-bound niches', 'neutral zones', 'co-dependence', and 'hybridity', thereby not only easing civil-military relationships (CMRel), but also increasing the efficiency of their application to Ebola response interventions. Furthermore, the hierarchical response centres were also found to be inclusive spaces that further increased efficiency through the decentralisation and localisation of these interventions and daily decision making, albeit for mostly privileged groups and in limited ways. Conclusions: This demonstrates how hierarchy and localisation can (and perhaps should) go hand-in-hand during future public health emergency responses as a strategy for more robustly including typically marginalised local actors, while also improving necessary efficiency—in other words, an 'inclusive hierarchical coordination' that is both operationally viable and an ethical imperative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2013–2016 West Africa Ebola Epidemic is the largest outbreak of Ebola in history. By September, 2014 the outbreak was worsening significantly, and the international president of Médecins Sans Frontières called for military assistance. In Sierra Leone, the British and Sierra Leonean militaries intervened. They quickly established a National Ebola Response Centre and a constituent network of District Ebola Response Centres. Thereafter, these inherently militarised centres are where almost all Ebola response activities were coordinated. In order to examine perspectives on the nature of the militaries' intervention, 110 semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted and analysed. Military support to Sierra Leone's Ebola response was felt by most respondents to be a valuable contribution to the overall effort to contain the outbreak, especially in light of the perceived weakness of the Ministry of Health and Sanitation to effectively do so. However, a smaller number of respondents emphasised that the military deployments facilitated various structural harms, including for how the perceived exclusion of public institutions (as above) and other local actors from Ebola response decision making was felt to prevent capacity building, and in turn, to limit resilience to future crises. The concurrent provision of life-saving assistance and rendering of structural harm resulting from the militaries' intervention is ultimately found to be part of a vicious cycle, which this article conceptualises as the 'political economy of expedience', a paradox that should be considered inherent in any militarised intervention during humanitarian and public health crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of growing concern with violence in Latin American and Caribbean cities this paper offers an analytical synthesis of urban securitisation which involves the construction of issues, spaces and populations as security threats. The synthesis contributes to debates on urban studies and critical security studies, which focus on neoliberalism as the driver of urban securitisation and militarisation as its main expression, by highlighting the embedded, contextualised and historically situated nature of securitisation and its multiple manifestations. The paper proposes a framework for the socio-spatial analysis of securitisation processes focusing on their causes, manifestations and consequences, while capturing their dialectic relation with cities' spatial characteristics. Bringing together Lefebvre's conceptualisation of the social production of space with Wacquant's analysis of the penal-assistential state, and using secondary sources complemented by primary data from our research, the paper shows that urban securitisation in this region is contingent to four socio-spatial dimensions common to Latin American and Caribbean cities – segregation, territorial stigmatisation, overlapping insecurities and territorial struggles. Using a multidimensional framework, the paper illustrates how unaddressed legacies of colonialism and notions of state power in the context of struggles with criminal actors have driven urban securitisation and diversified its targets and techniques beyond militarisation. Under a securitising logic, programmes which often appear progressive are also shown to prejudice marginalised groups and undermine democratic values. The paper concludes with a call for further multidisciplinary analyses that account for the socio-spatial and historical particularities of contemporary forms of urban securitisation in this and other regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how the experiences of soldiers' wives are mediated in the context of militarised popular culture and following two ultimately unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We show how audiences, representation (in two senses) and gender matter in a qualitative research project with soldiers, soldiers' wives and veterans, which explores their perceptions of contemporary media representations of British soldiering, and their social media use. In the summer of 2014, we interviewed 31 participants in 5 focus groups for a British Academy funded project. Participants were veterans, veteran support groups, family members (all 'wives') and those directly involved with the promotion of the armed forces in various media (the Joint Information Activities Group, Media Operations Team). The focus groups explored media representations of contemporary soldiering across a range of media and genres (TV documentaries, reality TV, drama, newspapers) but also social media use – practices of self-representation. In this article, we focus on interview data from the wives' groups (as they identify themselves) and find four emergent and overlapping themes: ridicule, comfort, danger and silence. We argue that the mediation of soldier's wives is an area of pronounced contradiction: one that is important in and of itself for what it tells us about the experience of that group of women and equally important for what it tells us about representation, practice and gender and the ways in which these are entwined in digital culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical research generally supports the dyadic-level trade-promotes-peace hypothesis, while demonstrating that the relationship is weaker, more complex, and more conditional than liberal theory suggests. We shift to the system level and examine a neglected path to conflict in economically interdependent systems. In the great power competition for support among smaller states, a great power at a competitive disadvantage in economic instruments of influence may be incentivised to adopt more militarised strategies. We illustrate our argument with case studies of Austro-Hungarian and Russian influence strategies before the First World War and of Prussian strategies among German states before the Franco-Prussian War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article seeks to advance a contrapuntal reading of experiences and practices of Women, Peace and Security (WPS) applications in Tunisia. Drawing from Edward Said, a "contrapuntal reading" encourages to look at multiple perspectives and experiences, beyond dominant ones, to achieve a better understanding of the way WPS applications intersect with contextual and power dynamics. By focusing specifically on European-Tunisian security assemblages and their WPS discursive-practical articulations foregrounded in 'capacity-building' and training sessions, the article argues that processes of militarization emerge distinctively from these assemblages and are linked to a muscular neoliberal security order that produces gendered divisions of labour, instrumentalizes (wo)men's roles and keeps them subjugated to masculine military requirements. Accounts emerging from in-depth interviews and participant observation are emblematic of the propensity to locate the genesis of gender-based discrimination and violence in the Tunisian context (and more extensively in the Global South), while discharging the conditions of reproduction of that violence favoured by policies of external intervention, including WPS ones, and by the militarization of social relations. This legitimizes and normalizes in turn the need for external intervention and training, undermines real gender transformative change and benefits versions of "state feminism" and its transnationally well-positioned Tunisian elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This article examines the conflict dynamics among the pastoralists in the eastern Rift Valley in Ethiopia. It focuses on the Ituu–Karrayuu pastoralists’ conflict encounters with their neighbours, the Afar and Argobba. The article aims to provide a deeper understanding of the changing patterns of the relation of conflict and land use in the territories shared by these groups and how it is influenced by boundary-making within Ethiopia in the early 1990s. It draws on fieldwork conducted in the Fantallee district in the Oromiya region from March to June 2020. The source of data for this article relies on qualitative methodology and data collected through interviews, focus group discussion, observation and document analysis. The data obtained through recording and note-taking were categorised and organised into relevant themes and analysed thematically. The findings reveal that the current pastoralist conflicts in the study area have become more rather than less dynamic and intense. Unlike the recent works on conflicts across the country, we argue that most of the conflicts occurring among the pastoral communities of the eastern Rift Valley are not driven by the policy of ethnic federalism alone. Instead, our research shows the changing nature of pastoralist conflicts is a consequence of multi-layered causes/actors and evolving state policies—in short, a consequence of a wider political and economic context. The study suggests the need for placing the pastoral issues within the broader political and economic contexts to address the tensions across the rangeland economy.

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The gradual process of planning and preparing for the mobilisation of national economy includes the set of measures that are taken in peacetime in order to capitalise on the entire economic potential of the country and subordinating it to the national defence effort, and is realised through drawing up and approving the Mobilisation Plan of the National Economy for Defence, sized for a period of one year and valid for four years. During the state of mobilisation, the implementation of this plan involves the implementation of the measures established by the Mobilisation Plan, adapted to the situation arising at a given moment, as well as some hypothetical measures that can support the achievement of the final goal. Thus, the possible militarisation of economic operators whose activity is directly related to the resources needed for defence is a subject of study that cannot be analysed outside of other specific procedures such as, for example, economic reconversion, requisitions of goods and the provision of services in the public interest, the mobilisation at work of persons with military obligations, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The huge changes that took place after the domestication of the horse at the beginning of the paleometall in the field of material and spiritual culture, in the social organisation of societies, undoubtedly affected the production of various tools. There were new types of tools that could be used as weapons. The tips of spears, arrows, darts, knives, harpoons, hammers, bolas and other artifacts from more than two hundred sites of Northern Kazakhstan, related to the Atbasar (7000–3000 BC) and Botai (4000–3000 BC) cultures give an opportunity to consider questions of forms of early militarisation of ancient societies. Some tools, their seriality and significant standardisation indicate that they could be universal and complex, they were used in agriculture, as well as in military clashes. After the domestication of the horse, the world of paleometall entered a new generation of wars aimed at the direct destruction of the enemy by cavalry. This is a fundamental change in the nature of armed conflicts, the transformation of the content of war or armed struggle in Antiquity. If the hostile conflicts among hunter-gatherers, which were the bearers of the Atbasar culture, are primarily local, then for the Botai people they are already reaching the interregional level.

En droit interne congolais, spécialement droit pénal militaire le traitement des personnes étrangères à l’armée interpelle et inquiète. L’interpellation se rapporte particulièrement à la situation des civils condamnés par les juridictions militaires dans le procès Kamuina Nsapu devant le tribunal militaire de Garnison de Kinshasa Gombe, accusés de mouvement insurrectionnel à Kinshasa et dans le Grand Kasaï. Et l’inquiétude est suscitée notamment par rapport au choix opéré sur la juridiction compétente militaire à la place des juridictions ordinaires conformément aux prévisions légales. L’étude a d’abord utilisé la méthode exégétique, en recherchant le vrai sens à donner aux dispositions normatives en rapport avec la question sous examen. L’objet majeur est celui de rendre justice, afin que le coupable subisse la sanction prévue par le texte pour son agissement, que les victimes soient rétablies, tant soi peu, dans leur droit, et que l’ordre public troublé par le comportement décrié soit rétabli au sein de la société toute entière. Or, le militaire vis-à-vis de la nation n’est pas soumis aux mêmes obligations que le commun des citoyens. Les dures exigences de son métier imposent qu’il soit régi par des règles particulières. Le fondement du droit pénal militaire et de la justice militaire réside dans la nécessité du maintien d’une façon permanente et sans relâche d’une discipline particulière aux Forces Armées et de la mise en œuvre des moyens propres à assurer la sécurité de l’Etat et de l’unité de la nation. Et donc confondre le militaire soumis à la discipline et le civil non soumis à une quelconque discipline à un même régime répressif serait alors une injustice institutionnelle.